One of the most important lessons I learned as a founder is that everyone will give you advice, and the advice will often conflict with other advice, and that's OK.<p>The trick is to look at the source of the advice and think about why that advice worked for them. What aspects of their situation are similar to yours?<p>So all advice is good, provided you use it all as inputs to your decision making and consider the context when you decide which advice to lean into.
There are some useful nuggets here, but every company and founder are different. Having run three different accelerator programs I have learned to STOP assuming what makes a good or bad idea. Some of the companies I thought were certain for failure have raised multiple rounds, found product market fit, and are growing just fine. The first 18 months of a startup should include one thing, "GET SOMEONE TO PAY FOR YOUR PRODUCT/SERVICE!" Everything else is just iteration.
I liked the thread a lot, but as with all things startup I feel a lot like this is trusting a very successful horse race gambler with his perfect method to track the form.<p>I have a feeling with these things timing and luck is everything no matter how well you follow what worked before. I bet some startups do almost the opposite of this advice and still end up doing well just because the idea and timing were so good.
/21 dont listen to these advice because that only worked one time for one person (myself)<p>I'm wondering if startup gurus know their advice won't help anyone but still give them because that's what people want to read. Or if they don't know this won't help anyone
Wasn’t this guy the CEO of the unnamed startup in Anna Wiener’s “Uncanny Valley”?<p><a href="https://slate.com/culture/2020/01/uncanny-valley-brand-names-anna-wiener.html" rel="nofollow">https://slate.com/culture/2020/01/uncanny-valley-brand-names...</a>
> Rolling out of bed in my pajamas and getting back to work with things precisely as I left them was the most underestimated superpower that brought me joy, focus, and speed—I had forgotten how much goes into getting ready for work.<p>There will be so much resistance to going back to the office.
A little bit more readable: <a href="https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1382351985584721926.html" rel="nofollow">https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1382351985584721926.html</a>
Suhail seems to be spending a lot of time trying to establish himself as a thought leader. How does that square or not square with the goal of giving one's business the best chance of success?
The two themes I'm noticing from this list are "Lean heavily into a founders/startup community" and "Ask tough questions often". There are several bullets around coaching, bouncing ideas off of other (external) founders, leaning into internal cofounders strengths/passions, etc. I would generalize to say these things are not specific at all to the first 18 months at a startup (or startups in general). Leaders should be communicating with other leaders, teammates should be relying heavily on other teammates, all humans should seek counseling (via therapists, coaches and friends). A significant part of this process is knowing when to just smile and nod through unsolicited feedback/shitty advice. This is also totally unrelated to startups.<p>To his second theme (ask tough questions often), it's just the common trap tons of startup founders seem to fall into. "We don't know if users will pay for this" should be one of the first questions you answer, way way before "How will we scale" or "What tech should we use". Managing worry is identical to asking tough questions (why are we worried about this and how do we overcome the worry). Mitigating risk is identical to asking tough questions (what could cause us to fail that is in our control). A part of being a leader is being unafraid to ask questions that need answering, even if their answers may be painful or scary. Most people aren't capable of looking hard at all of their possible failure scenarios honestly, and even less are able to objectively move forward with the findings of that examination. It's a tough ego game to play.
Good Lord this makes me feel old.<p>mixpanel: "Powerful, self-serve product analytics to help you convert, engage, and retain more users."<p>I'd love to read about founders that actually make something. In days of yore, practically any startup actually made a physical 'thing', unless they were busy writing some useful workstation software. Basing an entire economy on internet advertising and related issues strikes me as a risky bet.<p>To be fair, probably due to offshoring, about the only useful startups I've personally run into for the last decade or so have 100% been specialized medical hardware. The FDA can quickly become the main focus of your life.
As an early employee of several small startups that have grown to decent sizes, I'll never take the advice of a successful founder (I'll use it when it works).<p>After hiring hundreds of people the most knowledgeable people were the ones who worked on successful teams at failing companies, and very few founders go through that experience in the same way as non-founders do.<p>Founder advice is for founders.
Folks in this thread are assuming the author is trying to present a failproof method for creating a successful startup. But i don't think this is true. It seems more like simply words of advice.
With words of advice, you take what you can when it applies. But words of advice are hardly comprehensive or sufficient.
There's some great nuggets about business:<p><i>4/ Think of a way to make your users have some skin in the game enough to yell at you to make your product better. Charge or trade for it early on. Waiting for your product to be "good enough" reduces the amount you'll learn each day. The first set of users paid me $20 on Venmo!</i><p>This will vary by type of market you are pursuing. Some things are harder to charge for and take longer to get a first sale, but, yes, you need to be charging. Otherwise, you are "playing house" (a thing they say at YC) or you merely "have the trappings of a business, not an actual business" (that's my typical phrasing for the phenomenon).<p>In a nutshell: The difference between a business and a hobby is <i>paying customers</i>.<p><i>8/ Be married to the problem, not the technology.</i><p>There are some great videos from YC that also make this point and I think it needs to be said more often.<p>There are also some great nuggets about self-management that can be useful to anyone doing anything hard in life or living through a crisis. Some of these resonate with me as a former military wife who raised two special-needs kids mostly alone as the husband was often gone.<p><i>13/ If you're worried about something that will cause your inevitable demise, use my patented Threshold of Worry (tm):<p>1. Set a quantitative value for the worrisome issue.
2. If it's above the value, worry!
3. If it's below the value, focus on the next risk & ignore</i><p>I have a longstanding policy of "bread and circus." If you can work on the problem, work on the problem. If you can't work on the problem, feed everyone and keep them entertained so they aren't freaking out, panicking, fighting, etc.<p><i>17/ When building a startup:<p>If you have fear, de-risk by talking to users.
If you have uncertainty, build a prototype to rapidly rebuild your conviction.
If you have sudden doubt, sleep. Try again tomorrow.</i><p>When my kids were little and I was chronically short of sleep, I learned that eating something, drinking something and/or taking a short nap could be the difference between feeling like everything is overwhelmingly impossible and feeling like "The sun will come out tomorrow."<p><i>19/ I was ruthless about ensuring I had as much deep work time as possible. Live somewhere boring. Eliminate meetings. Don't meet investors if you're not raising. Build a rhythm each day that enables the largest chunk of hours to get great work done. Users will notice your pace.</i><p>This is gold. Stop whining about how you have a phone addiction and you can't turn your phone off because all your friends and relatives will be mad if you don't answer it and so on. Stop claiming that all the shiny tech we live with is controlling your life and you are a victim of circumstance. Start taking control over your time and doing what you need to do to carve out time to think, to work without distraction, etc.<p>We live in an incredible era with amazing things. But you do need to pick and choose and not feel obligated to be plugged into everything all the time. You do have a choice in the matter.